OTTAWA – Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised on Thursday to overhaul election rules in the near future after Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand warned there will be more misleading robocalls in the next election unless the government acts.

A day after he issued a report recommending an overhaul of the Elections Act to account for new technologies, Mayrand said Thursday that it is “becoming urgent” for the government to update the Elections Act.

“I’m afraid that what happened in the last election could re-occur,” he said during a briefing for reporters on the report. “And again the same obstacles that exist right now to the investigation will remain in place.

“In Guelph, according to public information, 7,000 calls were placed within 15 minutes at a cost of about $160. It’s very cheap to breach the legislation, undermine public confidence and, honestly, to try to deter or prevent people to cast their ballots.”

Mayrand’s report, tabled Wednesday, recommended putting new rules for political parties in place, increasing penalties and giving Elections Canada investigators new powers to look into complaints of wrongdoing.

Harper responded during question period Thursday morning, promising new legislation.

“These recommendations will be strongly taken into account as the government moves forward in the not-too-distant future with comprehensive reform,“ Harper said.

Harper reminded the House that the Liberal Party is so far the only one to face sanctions over 2011 robocalls, a reference to a CRTC penalty against Guelph MP Frank Valeriote’s riding association for breaching telemarketing rules.

Elections Canada is currently investigating the calls in Guelph and more than 1,400 complaints about misleading calls from voters in 246 other ridings.

We’re two years and a half or so away from the next election. Given the time it takes for the parliamentary process to follow its due course, I think we need to act sooner than later

At the height of the robocalls scandal in March 2012, the Conservatives supported an NDP motion promising to enact reforms within six months. Now, more than a year later, the government has yet to introduce the promised legislation.

Mayrand said Thursday that the new rules have to be put in place by the end of 2014 in order to give his agency time to prepare for the next federal election, anticipated in October 2015.

“We’re two years and a half or so away from the next election. Given the time it takes for the parliamentary process to follow its due course, I think we need to act sooner than later.

“It’s becoming urgent that we look at legislation to address the issues that arose during the 41st election,” Mayrand said. “Time is running out.”

The act as it’s written now was largely written before the wave of new technologies that we’ve seen over the last 10 or 15 years.

Mayrand said the ongoing investigations of allegedly misleading calls would have been easier had Parliament acted on the 55 recommendations for changes to the law that he made in 2010. Most of the revisions were approved by a parliamentary committee but never became law.

If the government had acted on those recommendations, he said, investigators looking into dirty political calls in the 2011 election would have been able to more easily get access to party records.

“Access to documentation, that would have been helpful,” he said.

Mayrand told reporters that the current election rules are so outdated they didn’t even contemplate the Internet when they were last revised.

“The act as it’s written now was largely written before the wave of new technologies that we’ve seen over the last 10 or 15 years. In that sense, it has failed to keep up with the times.”

He also said it’s necessary to update the law to give voters privacy protection. There are now no rules governing party databases.

“Nobody knows what information is maintained by parties on electors,” Mayrand said. “There’s no vehicle for an elector to see what information there is on their account, whether there are errors, whether it can be corrected, and they don’t know how that information is being shared.”